Early Risers

At one New York City high school, it takes students two
years—and lots of hard work—to start
college.

Time is on Cynthia Mothersil's side. The bubbly 16-year-old from Coney
Island, New York, who favors gold hoop earrings and braided hair, hopes
one day to become an OB-GYN. It's a goal that will launch her on a
lengthy educational journey, requiring many years of study and
financial sacrifice. But last September, her path got a little bit
shorter.

That's because Cynthia enrolled at Bard High School Early College,
the first public school in the country to offer a free, full-time
college curriculum—and all the credits that go with it—to
high schoolers. In Bard's four-year program, students race through high
school requirements in 9th and 10th grades, then take college courses
in 11th and 12th grades. A student who graduates from this hybrid
institution receives an associate of arts degree and has enough credits
to enter a four-year college as a junior.

Cynthia says the college-level studies she's engaged in at Bard
Early College are a welcome change from the less rigorous curriculum at
her previous school. "The teachers in my public school didn't prepare
me for the work I'm doing now, so how would they have prepared me for
med school?" she asks.

Cynthia is not alone in seeking a shorter path to college and
career. When Bard Early College opened in September2001, some 1,700
applications poured in for its initial 260 spots. Many of the students
who entered the school transferred from top high schools. Harry
Calhoun, a 16-year-old who left the selective Connecticut boarding
school Hotchkiss, was drawn by the prospect of generating free time for
himself before college. "I'll probably use it to take a year off and do
an internship," he says.

Student Cynthia
Mothersil, visiting Bard Early College's New Home, is seeking the
shortest path to a medical career.
—Emile Wamsteker

Junior Isatu Jalloh transferred from Brooklyn College Academy, one
of New York City's most competitive public institutions, in large part
to save money, she explained in June. Her family fled civil war in
Sierra Leone several years ago; her dad now works as a deliveryman, and
her mom is a nurse. One year of medical school will eat up her parents'
salaries, explained Isatu, who was willing to ride two hours by bus and
subway to get to Bard Early College's building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn,
last year. (This summer, the school moved to its new home in
Manhattan.) "I want to be a doctor, and that takes 10 years," she
noted. "This saves me two years of that."

In March, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pledged $40million
to start 70 early colleges nationwide, many of which will look to Bard
Early College as a model. This means that within the next five years,
thousands of students will be starting college at 16, chipping away at
the structure of a century-old system of schooling.

And why not, asks Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, the
liberal arts institution that's running the new high school in
conjunction with the New York City Board of Education. Botstein himself
stuck around high school only through his sophomore year before heading
off to the University of Chicago at 16. Half a century later, he's one
of the most outspoken proponents of condensing the high school
experience, arguing that spending four years at the secondary level is
a waste of time for many and that students' boredom is at the root of
national problems such as high dropout rates.

"High schools can't maintain the attention span of students, and
then we blame them for not staying in a dilapidated school that's not
safe, and the teachers have no morale," Botstein says on his cell phone
as he shuttles from the Bard College campus in Annandale- on-Hudson to
New York City, a drive he makes several times a week. "We call the
students dropouts. We are failing them."

The college president also blames prolonged high school stays for
school violence. In 1999, he penned a New York Times opinion
piece linking the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, to
the artificial, popularity-driven culture bred by the typical insular
high school structure. "Most thoughtful young people suffer the high
school environment in silence and, in their junior and senior years,
mark time waiting for college to begin," he wrote. "The Littleton
killers, above and beyond the psychological demons that drove them to
violence, felt trapped in the artificiality of the high school world
and believed it to be real."

‘We call the students dropouts. We are failing
them.’

Leon Botstein,
President,
Bard College

Four years of high school is unnecessary, Botstein argued in his
1997 book, Jefferson's Children, because kids now are more
mature than children who lived 100 years ago, when the high school
model was devised. Modern students should be exposed to a more
demanding, adultlike environment earlier, he wrote, but they're held
back by tradition. "The ethos of the current high school structure
infantilizes the students and doesn't take them seriously," he claims
today.

Since 1979, Bard has managed a private boarding school—Simon's
Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts—where high schoolers
pursue college degrees, but for years Botstein also wanted to open a
public institution. His chance came in the spring of 2001 in a meeting
with New York City schools chancellor Harold Levy, when he found that
the two shared ideas about experimenting with public schools and
exposing children to high-level work early.

The New York City Board of Education agreed to fund a combination
high school/early college, giving the institution $900,000, or about
$2,500 per student, with Bard College adding money to cover additional
costs. (Bard's contribution, which includes supplementing teachers'
salaries to attract doctorate-holding professors, comes to about $1,400
per student.) Less than six months after the meeting, Bard Early
College opened with 9th and 11th grade classes. This fall, the school
is adding 10th and 12th grades and 15 more teachers.

On a sunny morning last May, the atmosphere in the hallways at Bard
Early College was quiet and professional. No bell urged kids to class;
no walkie-talkie-wielding assistant principal reprimanded students; no
loudspeaker blared announcements. Students, displaying the motivation
and maturity that got them into the school, moved from class to class
with little commotion and during free periods, studied together for
tests.

Shortly after 9 a.m., English professor Thomas Martin walked into a
classroom of 11 juniors and dropped Hamlet onto a round
conference table. "Can we clear the decks please?" he asked airily,
waving to the book bags piled in front of the sleepy students. "Let us
turn to Shakespeare."

Martin runs his
classes exactly as he did at the University of Tulsa, where he
was a professor for more than a decade.

Martin runs his classes exactly as he did at the University of Tulsa,
where he was a professor for more than a decade. Just as in college, he
didn't stop class or ask for a note when a heavy-lidded boy walked in
late. Students carried most of the discussion over the next 50 minutes,
dissecting character motivation and plot themes. Occasionally Martin
leaned back into his chair and pushed students to take their thoughts
further: "Yes, yes, what's going to happen here?" At the end of class,
he assigned homework: five to 10 pages of reading.

At the school, 9th graders follow a curriculum geared toward
preparing them for the New York State Regents examinations, including
English, global studies, math, science, and Chinese, Latin, or Spanish.
Juniors take four college-level courses. A humanities seminar
introduces them to both university-style writing and works by
significant authors, including Plato, Dante, and Shakespeare. Depending
on their skills, students are placed in physics, finite mathematics,
pre-calculus, or calculus. A language and an elective round out their
studies; in 2001-02, students chose one of nine courses, ranging from
African history to a literature seminar on Marcel Proust.

With challenging courses and about four hours of homework a night,
the program is not easy. Botstein acknowledges that the work is
difficult, but the school provides tutoring, and, he says, the rest of
the learning gap, if any, has to be made up with sheer drive.
Unfortunately, drive is not enough for every student. Isatu, a top
student at her previous school, earned C's at Bard Early College. When
she began to struggle, she switched into easier classes in an attempt
to improve her grades and remained committed to toughing it out.
"That's how it is," she said in June, stoically assessing her progress.
"That was high school. Here we have college-level work." Over the
summer, though, she decided the shorter route was too tough and won't
be re-enrolling this fall.

With challenging courses and about four hours of homework a night,
the program is not easy.

In fact, roughly 15 percent of Bard Early College's first class
dropped out by the end of this past school year. Principal Ray Peterson
says many of the students who left had been unprepared for the workload
and went back to traditional four-year high schools. "It means we need
to be more careful in admissions, and we need to explain carefully to
students and parents what's involved in adapting to this program," he
explains. "I think we've been more vigilant in interviews this
year."

And many kids apparently are up to the challenge. Cynthia
Mothersil's mother, Marie Sandaire-Jasmin, says her daughter is
thriving on the experience. "She's a different person now,"
Sandaire-Jasmin notes. "She takes life more seriously." Cynthia is
motivated by the school's emphasis on preparing for the future,
according to her mom: "At her last school, she didn't have any idea
what was out there. At this school, the director helps students find
out what they want to do."

"There are some students who have problems and maybe shouldn't be
here," observes professor Martin. "But they're in the minority." In
fact, he says, some of his high school scholars are more advanced than
his college students were.

For the most part, teachers are happy at Bard Early College. Of the
25 hired initially—15 with doctorates—only one left during
the school year. (Another transferred to Simon's Rock at the end of the
year as part of a prearranged plan.) One source of frustration,
however, has been the New York state requirement that every public
school educator hold an official teaching certificate. It means that
many of the professors have had to enroll in night or summer classes to
earn certification, despite multiple degrees and decades of
experience.

The teachers say they're intrigued by the early college philosophy
and want to work with highly motivated young people. Notes Martin,
"It's exciting to try and do something different in the public school
system."

"In New York state, the emphasis is always on the children in the
lower end, and the children in the higher spectrum were being ignored,"
math professor Ved Shravah observes. "Twelfth grade is a waste of time
for the children at the top level. This is for them."

Botstein's hope for Bard Early College is that it will demonstrate
how to give students a challenging experience in high school. "I would
never claim that this helps the unmotivated child," he says. "Will it
help someone who cannot learn higher math skills? No. Will it help
someone with extremely limited cognitive intelligence ability? No. This
is no miracle cure. But there is a group that can achieve a higher
educational level than what is happening now."

Christina Asquith is a free-lance writer in New York City. She is
finishing a book about her first year as a teacher in a Philadelphia
public school.

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